Igor Stravinsky, like 1,000,000 other U.S. record buyers, liked Woody Herman's scat-and-screech-filled Caldonia ("What makes your big head so hard?"). Stravinsky liked it so well that he wanted to write music for Herman's band too. The result was an eight-minute Ebony Concerto, which had its premiere last week.
For a month, between theater dates,
Woody's bandsmen huffed & puffed through the Concerto's snarled rhythms. Said Woody: "We were pretty befuddled until Stravinsky . . . sang it to us. We usually know what's going to happen in our own things."
Stravinsky rehearsed the 18-piece Herman...
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